OBIEE 11g - Ensemble of Innovation and Integration

OBIEE 11g was launched in July and the software became GA a couple of months back (in August 2010). This release marks one more step in Oracle EPM consolidated product roadmap. For this release, Oracle has focused on 2 basic tenets: Innovation and Integration.

New innovative features have been incorporated and are backed by strong integration with disparate applications, source systems and Fusion middleware architecture resulting in integrated user interface offering streamlined experience to end users. At Infosys, we have explored 11g's new features and installation and upgrade process and would be detailing them out in a series of blogs on OBIEE 11g. This entry will focus on providing a high level overview of the new functionalities incorporated in OBIEE 11g.

Innovation: OBIEE 11g has incorporated new applications and features that empower end user to have exhaustive view of their businesses delivered as required.

Scorecard and Strategy ManagementThis is a performance management tool by which an organization can create objectives and initiatives that will form its strategy. Organization can then assign KPI's to its objectives and initiatives for measuring progress and performance. It empowers business user to articulate, monitor and communicate integrated strategy roadmap of organization to all the stakeholders.

Actionable Intelligence and AlertsIt empowers business user to invoke business processes and trigger workflows based on events identified through reports, dashboards and scorecards. It delivers on functionality of 'Guided Analytics' and provides for actionable insights to the user.

Interface improvementsDrill in place (instead of drill down to new view), presentation hierarchical columns, sliders for graphs and gauges, support for ragged, skip and unbalanced hierarchies, map view integration with NAVTEQ, Home Page (instead of My Dashboard as default page) with Recent and Most Popular Dashboards/ reports and full text search capability are some of the key improvements in the user interface of OBIEE 11g.

BI PublisherIt stands in stark contrast with previous versions in terms of architecture as well as functionality. It has segregated data model from report definition as separate object, thus making it reusable across different reports. It also allows for online creation and editing of reports and templates that removes dependency from traditional editors and allows for inclusion of rich UI features and standardization in reports across organizations. With its new data model editor that allows for federated queries across multiple data sources, it needs to be seen if it can act in itself, as an alternative to OBIEE 11g.

Fusion Middleware (FMW) IntegrationIntegration with Fusion Middleware brings with it major changes in architecture and host of new features provided by FMW. OBIEE 11g now boasts of new robust security architecture supported by identity management module, centrally controlled configuration module and inclusion of Weblogic server as default web server.

Hyperion and Essbase IntegrationOBIEE 11g delivers on union of BI analysis with Performance Management applications and is now integrated with Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management. Similarly, Essbase can now be used as a data source with 11g and the 10g limitations with Essbase have been sorted out (like support for ragged and unbalanced hierarchies, UDAs, Essbase MDX functions and flattening of hierarchies).

Mobile BIOracle promises to integrate OBIEE 11g with Blackberry (apart from current support for iPhone), thus expanding its reach to wide set of business community that relies on it as standard communication device. However current release of OBIEE 11g release is unclear on how to do so and hence users might need to wait for next release to be able to leverage this exciting feature.

Search functionalityOBIEE 11g is integrated with Enterprise search through Fusion Middleware, thus providing for secure search. It indexes all the Reports/Dashboards/KPI, thus enabling enhanced search capabilities across all functionalities.

OBIEE 11g promises to be next generation solution in BI space, with advanced technology and enriching features for end user. However, number of innovations and integration added to OBIEE 11g brings with it another set of challenges and questions. It still remains to be seen how developer community will react to the new architecture and functionalities of OBIEE 11g. Also, will the value additions that it brings in the new release result in fresh investments and product sponsorship from IT and Business managers.

Gaurav Gupta is an Associate Consultant in Infosys with over 3 years of IT experience. He is part of the Business Intelligence practice in Infosys and specializes in OBIEE with focus on the recent OBIEE 11g platform. His interest lies in consulting and sales support activities across BI domain.

Comments

It is interesting to observe how innovation and integration are clearly defined both in terms of scale and scope in this particular blog. I completely agree with the point that OBIEE 11g promises to be next generation solution in BI space, with advanced technology and enriching features for end user.

The author has neatly brought out points highlighting the power of the current technology along with the expected growth possible and the response of the user/developer community.